Now that he’s retired, Hubby is into a lot of newspaper reading. Every morning over several cups of coffee and breakfast, he reads three newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and the local newspaper, the SLC Tribune.

The subscription on the first two run out at the end of the year and he told me not to renew. The problem is, I don’t know where I’ll get the leads for some of my stories if he doesn’t have all these sources for the weird things he knows I’m attracted to! Maybe he’ll change his mind after a week or two of no news except that in the Trib.

For instance, today he told me about the latest from Lucy Kellaway who writes a column about work a couple of times a week for Financial Times. I won’t tell you about it now, but maybe I’ll write a post around it later on in the week.

Then he told me about a new game for knitters he’d read about in–of all places–The Wall Street Journal. If you’ve ever doubted the amount of knitting going on today, I challenge you to scout out all the blogs that are online on knitting. You’ll find that knitting is a global affair. I even read one myself which you’ll hear about later.

Readers swap patterns and stage “knitalongs,” where they work on projects simultaneously and share advice and photos. Other online events include Sockapolooza handknit sock exchanges, knitting festivals, and knitting olymphics.

Which gave Julie Gardner, who’s a freelance TV and film production manager near Belfast, Northern Ireland the idea to invent a contest for online knitters based on a popular college game called Assassin, which requires participants to shoot assigned target players with water pistols or nerf weapons, or tag them with spoons. When they get tagged or shot, the game is over for them. Last player standing is the winner.  

She calls it Sock Wars, and provides each player with the name, address and shoe size of a target. The race then begins. Each player knits a pair of socks from the original pattern provided that each knitter must use. The completed socks are then mailed to the designated target, who is then eliminated or “killed,” and must ship back to their assassins the pair they had been working on at whatever stage of completion. The assassins then finish that pair and send them along to that victim’s target, unless the knitter, heaven forbid, receive their own killer socks before they finish. This ritual continues until only one knitter is left and is declared winner and receives as a prize–a pair of socks! 

This made me think of Ashley of Girl & Her Dog & Knitting in my sidebar Blogroll. If anybody I know could knit that fast, it would be her, so I clicked onto her site to see if there was a war going on there. Nope! Not yet anyhow. But it could happen by and by. What I did find going on was a charitable effort for Heifer International. All you do is order a pattern for the cute little tiger baby hat and proceeds go to the charity. So far they’d raised $750. The hat is adorable. Hop on over and have a look.

Knitting as an activity, which according to Ms. Gardner is “the new yoga”, seems so opposite the theme of war, but even though, it seems some knitters stage sock wars while others gear their knitting towards donations to charity. Hummm. Very interesting!